In the world of SEO, keyword research is where it all starts. You don’t have to dig too deep when you first start investigating your SEO strategy to discover the importance of optimising your content for specific phrases.
We’ll skip the whole importance of keywords in this post, other than to quickly remind you that you need them and that you should use them in the right places (and in moderation).
Here, we’re going to look at the process of finding the right keywords to use in the first place by using the following four simple strategies.
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Get Your Thinking Hat On
Brainstorming with pencil and paper (or an Excel spreadsheet) is a great place to start. It gets your creative juices flowing and helps to get you into the mind of your customers.
Sit down by yourself or with your team and write down the types of searches you think your targets might use to find your services and goods. Write down as many as you can, and don’t worry about which ones will make the final list.
Go beyond two-word keyword phrases. These days, many people will search on their mobile devices using voice search, so think about the types of queries they may speak aloud, and write these down too.
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Get Suggestions from Google
Google’s suggest feature is the next stage. When you head to the Google search page and start typing in a query, Google will automatically make suggestions. These are there to help searchers, but you can use them for your keyword research.
Not only will this tool help you with your brainstorming, but it will also display searches that have already been made.
Did you know that 500 million completely new searches are made every day in Google? The suggestions you see are all searches have been used before, so you know they are likely to be used again.
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Find Out the Search Volume
You should by now have a large list of potential keywords to use, but now it’s time to take your research further – again without spending a penny.
Sign up for an AdWords account (even if you don’t intend to use it), and check out the Keyword Planner tool. While designed to help advertisers, it actually provides a lot of useful information about keywords.
It will provide plenty of suggestions, and it will also provide search volumes for each keyword so you can see whether it is worth targeting them or not.
Save as many as you like and download them directly to your computer, and you could find hundreds of new keywords this way.
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Get Some Help from Your Customers
One of the best ways to find potentially powerful keywords that you might not have considered is to use your customer reviews.
Go to your reviews and start reading them, and make a note of the types of words and phrases that your customers use to describe your products.
Then borrow them! These are the very same words your customers are using, so it stands to reason that your target audience is going to be using them in the search engines.
And a Few More to Consider …
These four strategies will get you a long way, but they are just the start and there are plenty of more advanced tools available.
You could use another free tool like Google Trends to take your research further, or alternatively you might want to try a paid tool like SEMrush, Keyword Explorer or KWFinder
Put Your Keywords to Work
Using these four techniques, you will potentially find hundreds of keywords to use on your website and in your content.
Of course, choosing the best ones and then using them is a whole other area, and that’s something that we can help you with.
So if you’d like a hand with optimising your site for SEO, or with finding the right keywords to target in the first place, we’d love to hear from you.
